Anxiety and Aeschylus
By Claire Baxter, 14 September, 2024
Paper presented at ‘The concept and the clinic of anxiety’
ACP/FOM Symposium/Colloquium on September 14th 2024, Parkville.
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Abstract
Does the oldest known trilogy, The Oresteia, describe anxiety without naming it as such? Sometime before Hippocrates defined the affection (πάθoς) of fear (ΦÏŒβoς), Aeschylus gave us words like arrows, deception, and a fear of true words. Aeschylus weaves together two ancient narratives - the curse of the house of Atreus, and the devastation of the Trojan war - to trace the arc of affect from intergenerational family revenge to the arrival of Athenian law.
If we can be orientated towards anxiety by what the subject cannot speak, who or what is it that forbids it be spoken, and once spoken, how is it received?
Can the ancient work of Aeschylus help us, as masked creatures, hear the speech of Lacan’s praying mantis? And if so, how much of one’s own language might one actually understand on the thin branch of time where life must, eventually, run into death.
Paper
Anxiety represents a challenge for psychoanalysis, because it does not lie comfortably in the familiar realm of the repressed. Anxiety is not repressed. Anxiety is an affect; ‘what is repressed are the signifiers that moor it.’
How do we understand it then? How do we, to quote from the call for papers for this seminar on anxiety, ‘make it speak’? Or even how do we speak about it?
Lacan’s concept of anxiety comes as a relief, because anxiety is not without an object. That anxiety is not without an object frees us from the constraints we would encounter if we were to observe the distinctions between ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ based on the presence or the absence of an object. It’s a division that really rather upsets the history of nosology, and you can get caught in the etymology of fear (phobos, Greek work) and anxiety (angor, Latin word). You can get utterly tangled in the etymology, the epidemiology and the nosology of anxiety. I almost didn’t finish this paper because of it.
But, anxiety is there, clearly, in the earliest known medical catalog, the Hippocratic corpus from 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The Hippocratic corpus restricted medicine to natural phenomena and kept the gods firmly out: but it couldn’t keep anxiety out.
Enter the story of Nicanor and Democles, in what is probably the first clinically documented case of anxiety.
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‘Nicanor’s affection, when he went to a drinking party, was fear of the flute girl. Whenever
he heard the voice of the flute begin to play at a symposium, masses of terrors rose up.
He said that he could hardly bear it when it was night, but if he heard it in the daytime he
was not affected. Such symptoms persisted over a long period of time. Democles, who
was with him, seemed blind and powerless of body, and he said he could not go along
a cliff, nor on to a bridge, to cross a ditch of the least depth, but he could walk through the
ditch itself. This affected him for some time.
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(Hippocratic corpus)
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The cases of Nicanor and Democles are recorded in one entry because Nicanor and Democles approached the physician together. The fact that they were speaking to a doctor suggests both that these two men were troubled by their experiences, and also, that they were talking about it - possibly at a drinking party, but we won’t hold it against the physician for not disclosing this.
There’s further discussion in the Hippocratic corpus of the phenomena of fear, this time with respect to madness and a fatal case of delirium with another patient (not discussed here). The Hippocratic writer assumes that madness is due to bile affecting the brain. He links ‘fearful dreams’ and terrors to the heating effects on the brain of excess bile. The suggestion, then, is that Nicanor, terrified as he is of girls who play upon flutes in the night, suffers from too much… bile.
No treatment is given to either Nicanor or Democles, indeed, what exactly might the physician have treated, and how, for while Democles avoided - he was walking through ditches rather than over bridges - Nicanor endured: he kept going back to the flute filled drinking parties.
How do you treat anxiety and terror? And the Greeks in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE were terrified people. Enter Philosopher Epicurus - roughly 100 years after Hippocrates. He devotes a good third of his famous letter to Menoccleus on how to live a good life, on why one should not fear death.
Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death
is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living
or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
(Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus)
This is brilliant reasoning for why we should not fear those things that are not in close proximity but it does not explain why we do. However, where philosophy and medicine floundered, literature had already flung it onto the stage for us to see and experience. ‘Onto the world’s stage we go.’
In seminar X, Lacan plays with the idea of stage as a temporal phase - mirror stage - and stage as a theatrical, framed space. David Sigler and Celise Lypka in their 2019 paper called Time/Frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan’s Anxiety Seminar, argue that Lacan recasts his own idea of a mirror stage, and fuses it with Freud’s 1919 essay, Das Unheimlich or ‘The Uncanny.’ The introduction of the uncanny into the mirror stage emphasizes the imaginary production of a moment, rather than a theory of embodiment. Lacan considers the frame around the mirror, not just the reflective glass. The appearance of the unheimlich has to do with the emergence of an object - a familiar, or heimlich object- where we expect lack. We are able to consider anxiety as, quote ‘the experience of the heimlich within the frame.’
Lacan invokes Freud’s reference to ‘ein andere schauplatz’ or ‘another scene’ to further develop the metaphor. There is the world, and the stage. 'The stage is the radical distinction between the world, and the locus where things, if only the things of the world, come to be voiced.' (Lacan Seminar X, p 33)
The whole world, then, is put upon the stage. Anxiety is framed. The stage allows for the emergence in the world of that which may not be said.
Enter, the oldest known trilogy of Greek plays: older even than the Oedipus trilogy: Aeschylus’ Orestia. The three plays - The Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides - are about the call to revenge within the family.
If you are a young man, and your mother has killed your father, should you in turn, kill her? Orestes, son of Clytamestra and Agamemonon, had terrible trouble with this one.
About thirty years before Sophocles gave us Oedipus, the man who was troubled by his desire for his mother, Aeschylus gave us Orestes, the man who is called upon to avenge his father by killing his mother.
When your mother protests that the reason she killed your father is because your father killed your sister, should you still avenge your father, the murderer of your sibling?
When your uncle (or second generation uncle) Agesthius, claims that the reason he shacked up with your lying, adulterous, treacherous mother to kill your father, has absolutely nothing to do with your sister, but because of what your grandfather, Atreus did to his grandfather, Thyestes two generations ago. Your grandfather, Atreus, tricked his brother, Thyestes, into eating his own children. That’s right: your grandfather slaughtered his nephews, cooked them up, and invited his brother - the father of the children - to dinner.
What do you do, when being part of a family means that every murder must be avenged, and to carry out this obligation of vengeance, you in turn become the murderer. What do you do, when your position in the family places you as both avenger, and murderer?
In 1962, Lacan, invited, during a seminar on Anxiety, the participants to imagine a scenario.
Myself donning the animal mask…, I pictured myself facing another animal… a praying mantis.
Since I don’t know, however, what mask I am wearing, you can easily imagine that I had some
reason not to feel reassured in the event that, by chance, this mask might have been just what
it took to lead my partner into some error as to my identity. The whole thing was well
underscored by the fact that…I couldn’t see my own image in the enigmatic mirror of
the insect’s ocular globe.
(Lacan, Seminar X, p 7)
The family, and the relationships within it, might be thought of as a family of praying mantis, and you must take up your position on the branch within the family. You can take a mask, if you like.
Epicurus, the philosopher, in his exhortation to simply stop fearing death had forgotten the incredible, unbearable proximity of the family. Aeschylus the playwright hadn’t forgotten: for Aeschylus, what you feared was not so much death, as your own deadly position.
In Seminar III, Lacan says:
The subjective appears in the real in so far as it implies that we have opposite us a subject
capable of using the signifier, not to signify something, but to deceive us over what there
is to signify.
(Lacan, Seminar III, p 186)
In Aeschylus’ trilogy, the family members of the house of Atreus lie, cheat and deceive with terrible sophistication. Clytamestra says to Agamemnon, Welcome home darling, I’ve been missing you. I left the gates wide open. Darling, you’re a hero, you’re godlike, have a bath, won’t you? Come, walk along these fine, red tapestries like a god, and I’ll treat you like one. Agamemnon protests.
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‘Such state benefits the gods, and none beside.
I am a mortal man, a man: I cannot trample upon
These tinted splendors without fear thrown in my path.
I tell you, as a man, not god, to revere me.’
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(Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 922- 925)
But Clytamestra enmeshes him further in her net of rhetoric, and he tiredly consents.
‘Now since my will was bent to listen to you in this
My feet crush crimson as I pass within the hall.’
(Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 944- 957)
Agamemnon walks across the crimson tapestries, and into the bath, where Clytamestra snares him in a net, and stabs him to death.
Anxiety is, Lacan says, between the mesh of the net. The net is the language of signifiers. Crucially, the signifier, signifies something other than meaning. Clytramestra has her reasons, afterall, for killing Agamemnon: he’d killed her daughter.
The problem of meaning and signification was neatly articulated by Marc Strauss in the 2024 rendezvous in Paris. I quote from his paper.
‘Psychoanalysis shows us why metonymy, the path of meaning, is a dead end; it is
incapable of translating into truth the urgency to say, and all it does is maintain the
subject’s anguish. After the horror of the act, we return to the anguish that arises
from the fact that we can never be sure that we are not being lulled into complacency,
whether we are listeners, analysands or analysts.
(Strauss, 2024)
As Marc Strauss writes, anxiety is not a matter of meaning. In Aeschylus's third play, the Eumenides, the goddess Athena enters to bring order to the escalating quarrel between Orestes and his supporters who advocate for his freedom, and the furies -- the horrible, witch-like creatures whose sole purpose for existence is to hound and torment those who have shed the blood of their own family. They argue, oh how they argue: legitimate, well reasoned arguments from both sides. Athena summons a court of law, and a jury to determine whether or not Orestes will go free. And, what happens?
… Athena rigs the vote, and Orestes goes free. Athena tells us:
‘I am always for the male…
And even if the votes are equal, Orestes is the winner.’
(Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 736-741)
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is justice!
There’s no meaning to it, it’s just a decision to act. To quote Lacan, ‘Human activity opens into certainty at the point of action. From anxiety, action, borrows its certainty. To act brings about a transfer of anxiety.’
But to return to another little problem: how is a fear of having a girl play upon a flute at night, similar to a fear of death? Enter Psychoanalytic theory, like the billy-goat (tragodie, in Greek) perhaps, that leaps from the world onto the stage.
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References
Crocq, M. Antonine. (2015) A history of anxiety: from Hippocrates to DSM Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 17(3): 319–325.
doi: 10.31887/DCNS.2015.17.3/macrocq
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Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, Trans. Robert D. Hicks, https://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html
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King, Helen (2013). Fear of flute girls, fear of falling. In: Harris, William V. ed. Mental Disorders in the Classical World. Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition (38). Brill, pp. 265–282.
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Konstan, D. (2006), The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, Toronto.
Lattimore, R. (ed. and trans.), Aeschylus, The Oresteia. (2013, Chicago.)
Sigler, D., Lypka, C., 2019 Time/Frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan’s Anxiety Seminar. ESC English Studies in Canada Vol 45. Number 4 Association of Canadian College and University of Teachers of English (ACCUTE)
Smith, W.D. (ed. and trans.), Hippocrates, Pseudepigraphic Writings (Leiden, 1990)
Strauss, Marc, 2024 Rendezvous in Paris